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Robert Armin's Moralising Anatomy of Fools' Jests Roberta Mullini, « “These sixe parts of folly”: Robert Armin’s Moralising Anatomy of Fools’ Jests », « Theta XI, Théâtre Tudor », 2013, pp. 23-40 mis en ligne en septembre 2014, <https://sceneeuropeenne.univ-tours.fr/theta/theta11>. Theta XI est publié par le Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, dirigé par Philippe Vendrix, Université François-Rabelais de Tours, CNRS/UMR 7323 Responsable scientifique Richard Hillman Mentions légales Copyright © 2014 – CESR. Tous droits réservés. Les utilisateurs peuvent télécharger et imprimer, pour un usage strictement privé, cette unité documentaire. Reproduction soumise à autorisation. Date de création septembre 2014 Theta XI – Théâtre Tudor Roberta MULLINI pp. 23-40 CESR, Tours “These sixe parts of folly”: Robert Armin’s Moralising Anatomy of Fools’ Jests Roberta Mullini Università di Urbino Carlo Bo Introduction “Pardon my folly in writing of folly” are words printed at the end of a book published in 1600, whose author used the pseudonym “Clonnico de Curtanio Snuffe”. Eight years afterwards the same text was reprinted with additions and minor changes, but on this occasion a clear authorship was declared: the writer of what followed was Robert Armin, at the time not only a well-known actor with the King’s Men, but also a sharer in the Globe theatre. Foole upon Foole, the title of the first edition, was changed to A Nest of Nin- nies, while the major additions consisted of a philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) frame in a — generally speak- ing — dialogic form, the protagonists of which are Sotto and the World, and of short paragraphs interspersed here and there within the six sections of the first edition.1 On the one hand, the epigraph on the title page (“Stultorum plena sunt omnia”) seems to connect this new version of Armin’s work to the Erasmian tradition of The Praise of Folly, but, on the other, the frame and some speeches 1 Armin’s two works will be abbreviated in references as FuF and NoN. Quotations from both texts will be drawn from the facsimile edition (Armin, Collected Works). All quotations and names are modernised with respect to i/j, u/v and w/v. exchanged in the sections which precede and follow the tales appear to look back to the allegorical world of the morality plays. By 1600 Armin had been a member of the then-Chamberlain’s Men for about one year (or two at the most), that is, since Will Kempe had left the com- pany, thus offering a new clown the possibility of playing that role in Shake- speare’s plays. How Armin’s entry effected deep changes in Shakespeare’s comic parts and in the creation of “new” fools is now widely acknowledged with respect to not only the turn-of-the-century festive comedies (As You Like It and Twelfth Night), but also the “problem” plays (witness the characters of Lucio in Measure for Measure, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida and Lavatch in All’s Well that Ends Well), in addition to aspects of Hamlet, where the prince’s “antic disposition” mimics representational and performative features of a fool.2 Actually, Foole upon Foole was reprinted (with some elisions) in 1605, but again the author used a pseudonym: this time “Clonnico del mondo Snuffe”, with a not-so-hidden hint at the Globe theatre, where the King’s Men performed at the time. In 1608, Armin’s fame was even greater, partly due to his own plays, as well as to his becoming, very probably, the co-creator of many comic parts in Shake- speare’s. This is likely the reason why he dared to show his name overtly as the author of A Nest of Ninnies, and — perhaps to prevent his readers from remember- ing his activities in a far less prestigious venue than the Globe — cancelled every- thing that might remind them of his previous connections with the Curtain theatre. Above all, he transformed what can be called a “jest book” (Foole upon Foole) into a philosophy of folly (A Nest of Ninnies). To Robert Armin as an actor, rather than as the author of Foole upon Foole and of A Nest of Ninnies, John Davies devoted thirty lines in his collection of epigrams entitled The Scourge of Folly — a volume printed in 1611 when Armin was still alive (Davies, pp. 228-29) — while only eight lines were written to celebrate William Shakespeare, “our English Terence” (pp. 76-77). Davies praises “Honest Robin” (p. 228, l. 15), urging him to “play thy part, be honest still with mirth” (l. 23), and ends the poem by referring once again to Armin’s profession as a theatre performer, who “wisely play[s] the fool” (l. 30). In Davies’s thirty lines, there are also some echoes of Armin’s words in Foole upon Foole and of Viola’s comment on Feste in Twelfth Night. Davies ends his verse with the couplet, “So thou, in sport, the happiest men dost schoole / To do as thou dost, wisely play the 2 See Felver, p. 31; Wiles; and Aspinall, p. 48. But cf. Somerset. 26 ROBERTA MULLINI THETA XI foole”; Viola begins her praise of Feste with “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool / And to do that well he craves a kind of wit: / He must observe the mood on whom he jests” (TN, III.i.59-61).3 Armin writes, when telling anecdotes about Jacke Oates, his first fool: Naturall fooles are prone to selfe conseit, Fooles artificiall, with their wits lay waite To make themselves fooles, likeing the disguises, To feede their owne mindes and the gazers eyes. (FuF, sig. B2r, ll. 1-4) The three texts share a similar concept of the folly shown by an artificial fool, whether actor or court fool. Evidently, late Elizabethan and early Stuart dis- courses of folly had abandoned the religious condemnation of the stultus and used fool and folly with a wider social and cultural meaning. What follows aims both at analysing the idea of folly which underpins Armin’s two works on folly and at evaluating how the writer describes the fools he presents, especially from a physical point of view. It is a description which he might have kept in mind when performing not only “John of the Hospitall” in his own Two Maids of More-clacke (1609), but also Shakespeare’s fools.4 The Two Texts about Folly Foole upon Foole and A Nest of Ninnies present episodes from the lives of six fools. The events and their textual rendering are exactly the same in both works, but, as already mentioned, NoN embeds the narrations in a frame in which Sotto introduces Lady World to the tales and their protagonists. The various episodes begin with an initial header, “The description of…”, which includes the name of a specific fool. Each “description” is a poem of a variable number of lines and of stanzas, which acquaints the reader with the physical features of the fool whose biographical episodes are narrated soon afterwards. In NoN, though, there is no header to the introductory poems and they are shorter than in FuF and differ- ent in some issues, as will be discussed later. In writing his jests, Armin always appears very scrupulous about the historicity of the events, or — at least — of the 3 This and other quotations from Shakespearean plays are drawn from Shakespeare, Collected Works, ed. Wells and Taylor. 4 Cockett analyses how Armin’s studies of natural fools might have helped him in the performance of the major Shakespearean fools, especially Touchstone in As You Like It. THETA XI ROBERT ARMIN’S MOraLISING ANATOMY OF FOOLS’ JESTS 27 characters. So, for instance, the first character, Jacke Oates, is said to be Sir Wil- liam Hollis’s fool, probably a personage recognizable by the readers, at least in the north of England, since events are located near Lincoln. Similarly, Jemy Camber, “borne in Sterlin but twenty myles from Edinborough” (FuF, sig. B4r), is said to be the fool of the (unnamed) King of Scotland, and connected with such cour- tiers as the Earl Huntley, the Earl Norton, and Lady Carmichell (sig. B4r, C2r, C2v, respectively). The third fool, Leanard, is “now living well knowne of many” (sig. C4r); Jacke Miller, the fourth, was “borne in Wostershire, / And known in London of a number there” (sig. D3r, l. 24). Will Sommers, “the Kings naturall Iester”, comes fifth, and is presented “as report tells me” (sig. E1v), while the last fool, Iohn of the Hospital, is “Knowne to all London since he liu’d so late” (sig. F1r, l. 2). In other words, Armin seems to take special care of historical details, so as to stress the truthfulness of what he narrates in the jests. The key words in Armin’s Foole upon Foole and in A Nest of Ninnies are, obvi- ously enough, “fool” and “folly”, both of which seem to have lost their religious content. The latter word has a rather secularized meaning, roughly in the sense of “lack of understanding”, while the former acquires very specific denotations pertaining to the medical and the social spheres: a fool is either a person afflicted by some mental disorder or a person living in a household as a jester. Armin thereby introduces a distinction within the world of fools, who are divided into “fools naturall” and “fools artificiall”, but in his work it is not easy to separate the two categories clearly, since nearly all of his six characters, in spite of being labelled as natural because suffering from weak brains and mental disorders, show certain signs of wit.
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